Your first computer

[Miss Chicken]

I have just bought myself a new computer and I couldn't help but compare it to my first computer which I bought back in 1994.

My first computer was a 386 running Windows 3.1. It had A 40mb hard-drive and if I remember correctly it's speed was 30Mhz.

On this computer we played the first two Monkey Islands, Loom, Wolfenstein, a couple of Indiana Jones adventures etc. We didn't start to use the internet until a couple of computers later.

So tell us about the first computer you or your family owned and what you used it for.

 

[An Officer]

My first was a Packard Bell running the disastrous Windows Millennium Edition, bought sometime late 2000, it had a 7 GB memory which I was so impressed with.

It crashed every day and a dozen on Sundays.

Windows 7 for the win!

 

[C. Cole-Chakotay]

My first was a Compaq running windows 98. It was a fine machine.

 

[farmkid]

The first computer I used to any extent was a Kaypro IV my father bought in 1984. It had a 4Mhz Zilog Z80 CPU, 2 double sided/double density 5 1/4 floppy drives, and 64K RAM. Not a speed demon, but it was quite reliable. It was used for everything--school reports, bookkeeping for my father's farm, games, programming, etc. for 10 years until he bought a Compaq 486 in 1994. It never crashed once in all that time.

My own first computer was a 386DX40 I bought from my cousin my second year of college when he upgraded to a Pentium something or other. It had 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard drive. I made lots of upgrades over the years and I suppose you might say I still have the same computer, since I have not replaced it with an entirely new computer since then. Every upgrade has been some new parts with some parts kept from the previous version. Everything has been replaced several times, but an unbroken lineage could be traced back to that original computer. In fact, I still have most of those original parts kicking around in a box somewhere.

 

[MANT!]

First my family had..
Commodore PET 2001
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET

My own..Apple Macintosh Performa 475..
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_performa/stats/mac_performa_475.html
I had 1 Meg of RAM a cassette CDROM drive..a 14" color monitor and a screaming fast 56K modem..
Cruised the early internet with this little puppy...

This little hummer played Marathon, Marathon 2, Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Spaceship Warlock..as well as hours of internet fun..

 

[iguana_tonante]

A 1983 MSX VG8020 by Philips: 3.58 MHz processor, 32 KB ROM, 64 KB RAM.

This one (not my actual one, it has been disassembled long ago).

Quite the dinosaur, but still charming.

 

[CorporalClegg]

 

[Holdfast]

BBC B Acorn Microcomputer in the early '80s:



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Acorn is of course long-gone, but their direct descendant ARM is now a multi-billion company with dual FTSE 100 and NASDAQ listings. From tiny Acorns...

 

[ThunderAeroI]

Define 'computer'.

My very first 'computer' was this: Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A, as rare as they were I still have access to one of them. The very first one i had was stolen when I was a kid when our house was robbed.

I then had a pong machine and some other toys as well.

The first modern age computer would have been an IBM Apex 8086.

 

[CorporalClegg]

The first modern age computer would have been an IBM Apex 8086.

I had one of those too.

At some point (87?), I got a Mac Plus. (Shh, don't tell anyone.) It was my first and last.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Apple ][+, purchased in 1982

 

[Amaris]

My very first computer was a Commodore 64. On that machine, I learned how to type, and how to program (in basic). A year later, I moved up in the world to a Zenith DataSystems 286, that came with a 12mhz processor, 1 Mb of RAM, and a 10MB hard drive, pre-loaded with Windows 3.0.

 

[auntiehill]

My very first computer (back when I was a sophomore in high school) was an Adam. Boy, did the salesman see my mom coming... . It was really nothing more than an over-glorified typewriter with the loudest f**king daisy-wheel printer in the WORLD.

We only kept it for a couple of years, before it ended up at Goodwill.

 

[Candlelight]

Got a Commodore 64 machine sometime in the mid-to-late 80s. Awesome games. Really wish I could play them all again.

Then upgraded to a Pentium running Windows 3.11 on a monochrome (albiet green) monitor. Plus 47MB HDD. Very limited in what I could do as wasn't very computer literate back then. When it died I took out every single nut and bot I could see for a laugh. Bloody thousands of them.

Then a Windows 95 machine with a 1.3GB HDD showed up in 1996 and loved it. It survived until 2000 after which a hard drive failure (amongst others) saw it bite the bullet.

My final workstation was in 2002, a very reliable HP running XP. Best machine I've ever had. Nothing died on it. Still have it hooked up to my TV as a playout machine.

Lastly, got a Toshiba laptop last year running Windows 7.

This doesn't include my work computers, which currently stands as a 2011 MBP.

Yep, that's my computer history.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

My parents had an Apple II earlier, but my first computer as a kid in the early-80s was a Commodore 64.

I used to play Paperboy and Archon on that all the time.

 

[Non Sync]

My first real computer (not counting the Timex Sinclair) was a gray cased Osborne in 1984. I still have it and the last time I fired it up was in 2006.

It still was able to read the 5.25" floppy disk that I made back in 1984.

 

[Davros]

Compaq Presario running windows 3.1

 

[Roger Wilco]

I don't remember what the name was, but my mother bought a computer in the early 80s that she said was very expensive, and I clearly remember that it had "normal" speed which was 4MHz and a "super speed" button (it was called something different though), that accellerated the computer to a sensational 8MHz. I used to turn it on every now and then, but it stopped working a couple years ago.

 

[Captain Ice]

Define 'computer'.

My very first 'computer' was this: Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A, as rare as they were I still have access to one of them. The very first one i had was stolen when I was a kid when our house was robbed.

I then had a pong machine and some other toys as well.

The first modern age computer would have been an IBM Apex 8086.

We also started with a Ti-99/4a in about 1982 or early 1983. Ours came with an audio cassette recorder for storing data.

In 1984, we upgraded to the "Fat" Mac. This machine was something like $2000 in 1984 and I remember being very impressed with it at the time. I forget the name of the game, but I spent quite a lot of time playing a game where you were the captain of a Gato class submarine and your mission was to sink as many Japanese ships as you could before running out of torpedoes. Thing is that the game had a heck of a glitch. If you shot the torpedo from dead ahead of the ship, you hit it every time.

I bought my first computer in late 1998 or early 1999. It was a Dell Dimension L 433 with an Intel Celeron processor in it. If you really want to get technical about it, I'm still using this machine. When the MB on it crapped in 2003, I stripped the chassis, bought a new CPU, MB, case, and RAM and built myself a PC for the first time. While most everything else has been upgraded time and again, this machine I am using today still has the original 3.5" drive, speakers, and CD-Rom drive that came with the Dell in 1998...

 

[ITL]

Got a Commodore 64 machine sometime in the mid-to-late 80s. Awesome games. Really wish I could play them all again.

I still do, on occasion. I use an emulator on my PC. Many games here.

My first computer was a ZX Spectrum, back in the early 80's. After that, I had Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines before moving up to Amigas.

My first PC was a 486 with a 384 MB hard drive. Good grief. Still, it got me onto the Internets for the first time.